Obsession with golf will sink our children

Pat Kane, The Sunday Times, 26 August 2001

The toe-curling embarrassment that is "Team McLeish" is unabated. This week, their greatest triumph of statecraft: an £80m bid for a 2009 golf tournament which would put a "club in the hands of every child in Scotland".

So not only will we have tens of thousands of check-trousered golf nomads padding happily (and lunching heavily) throughout our royal courses, we'll also have mini-Tigers and Tigresses trained, fit - and ready to caddie for them.

Former sports minister Rhona Brankin said of this alarming new policy: "Golf is immensely popular in Scotland . . . we want to widen opportunities and introduce all boys and girls to the game by age nine."

As my soul hero George Clinton might have growled: one nation under a grove, getting damp just for the funk of it. From constitutional convention to morning constitutional. From Third Way to Straight Down The Middle. (See? All this McLiché stuff is easy once you get into the - thwack! - swing of it).

They've fixed all those hospitals and schools, then. Otherwise how else could the executive devote such an awesome amount of public money to a good walk spoiled?

Yes, we know turning Scotland's green spaces into a corporate playground is a cornerstone of our tourism strategy. And we wouldn't want to make light of the £120m, over and above the expenses, that the Ryder Cup would bring to Scotland (a statistic worth closer examination).

But golf, for God's sake? Has post-industrial Scotland come to rely on this creakiest, most leathery of leisure pursuits? And why can't they leave our children out of it?

It's easy to list why golf should not be regarded as our national pastime. Even as a "sport" its claims to legitimacy are risible. In real sports you defend something - in football a goal, in cricket the wicket, in basketball the net. As Allen Barra of The Wall Street Journal asks, is golf any better exercise than chess? Isn't it less a sport, and just a game?

Even the hype over Tiger Woods, "the greatest athlete in the world", must be doubted. Has he battled through the ranks to global excellence as Premiership footballers or Olympic athletes have? Or is it that - in a sport where a prematurely-aged, floridly-puffing Teletubby like Colin Montgomerie is a competitor - one fit and concentrated athlete can clean up?

Devotees rhapsodise about the "levelling" nature of golf, where a duffer can match a professional with the appropriate handicap. I'd answer that, maybe, it isn't about competition at all. It's a male bonding ritual: stick, balls, silence. No women.

This would explain the near-masonic attendance to clothing that golf demands of even its most casual players. The V-neck sweaters, two-tone shoes and ill-fitting trousers are so screamingly, camply, patriarchal. Did someone decide to freeze golf's sartorial details at 1953, when women knew how to chain themselves to a Frigidaire?

All of which is only embroidery and lace around golf's institutional sexism. The Royal and Ancient Club at St Andrews, the "ancient home of golf", has an all-male membership policy. Ladies' doors, male-only playing times . . . what's going on? Can't we get the European Court of Human Rights in? Golf World magazine says it was only the whiff of lottery money that brought any change in Scottish clubhouse rules.

Golf's ethical emptiness is vast. A relative of mine, untroubled by ideology or prejudice, came to me in distress from a Glaswegian commuter-belt golf club to have some of the bar-room banter decoded.

"I don't know any Jewish people," he frowned. "Is it true they control all the banks and the newspapers?"

Golf World also notes that many Scottish clubs, even where the community is mostly from ethnic minorities, have "entirely Caucasian membership". No, really?

The anti-capitalists have a line on golf. Novelist and poet John Burnside makes a powerful case against "corporate golf" as a new form of Highland (and green belt) clearance. The beautiful unevenness of rural Scotland, he rails, is turned into "an ugly, brutal moonscape" by executive golf-and-leisure developments. He is particularly incensed by the herbicidal pollutants needed to maintain these "pristine fairways".

The executive should come clean about the mercenary nature of all this, and not disguise it with Braveheartish rumblings from Big Sean about our destiny as the "true home of golf" or, worse, Alex Ferguson's Pythonesque laments that there are "no golf courses in Govan - only boxing and football" (lucky Govan).

The Ryder Cup bid is about connecting an obvious Scottish national brand value to an easy source of executive tourist dollars.

But I object to Henry using our kids' leisure time as a social fig leaf for high commerce. Golf is a mediocre, lazy sport for disinterested, affluent people, and should be way down the list of preferred activities for a "healthy Scotland".

And anyway, if the current generation retains its current level of Genoa-style stroppiness, does the minister really want to arm our youth with nine irons? You never know what political targets they might want to take a thwack at.